


handwoven

by hoverbun



Category: Persona 3, Persona Series
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Nonbinary Character, Platonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-12
Updated: 2016-01-12
Packaged: 2018-05-13 08:38:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5702056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoverbun/pseuds/hoverbun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Minako wonders what cut them so badly. Shinjiro wonders why she bothers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	handwoven

**Author's Note:**

> note: shinjiro uses they/them pronouns.

She learns their body will lock and they will hook their arms to pry free of any hold that finds its way around them, unwelcomed arms and unwelcomed hands wrenched off them in fistfuls and sharp elbows. She’ll never know why, but she knows she doesn’t need to, that she wants to cut free the one kept pinned by visceral regret, but that there are stories she needn’t hear, experiences that don’t need to be recollected, like hands dipped at the surface of water. She knows, and she learns that she must ask to bring heel to heel, arm to arm.

( What sits in her lungs – not as a sickness, nor disgust, but a presence, like the memory of each brusque word sits in her chest and swings its low legs over her rib cage – is that she can’t account for others she knows like them. She paces herself in this courtship, open palms that close shut when she sits to speak, lips and lashes and coy charm waiting for another day, a better day, when they can appreciate it. If she understands one thing that she keeps into her pocketbook, one purpose that tucks behind her ears like the hair she pins, it’s that people are different. )

They splinter, cracked like their skull and blossoming the same dying roots that they feel inside them, and she sees pulsating warmth – it’s the first time she offers a smile and finds one pausing at the last-second interval to spread across gaunt and tired features. Progress, she mutters, when she loses count of the words they’ve exchanged, no longer brusque tones and terse words on anxious tongues. Progress, when they were the one to brush fingers over the curve of her uniformed shoulder, and not fixate a gaze at the side of her head, prying their uncut nails into her temple in anticipation for her to recognize them and their sterile voice.

It comes when she places her palms down and glance at the differences, where their fingers are alike in shape but theirs are still longer, swollen where the joints form and crowed with rot on the curve of their nails. When she brushes them together, gathering their left up in both of hers, they don’t wrench themself free of a trap, fingers twitching carefully while she reads the curved knuckles and counts the callouses on their fingers, palms. Callouses and marks she takes pause for, thumb over drying skin, lost touch.

It’s Minako who offers, feathersoft and fleeting, a thumb to the base of their wrist, steadying and so very present, careful where she touches the skin. She steals no glance upward, the affection kept in place out of her own will to see how far she can go, how long she can stay before they push her away, and should they choose to, she will understand. ( She can feel the callouses and marks under her fingers, with a warmth and lost purpose against her. But they look at her, when she moves her thumb and brushes the skin in a calm motion, and she can hear them exhale.  _You're safe_ _here. You're valued here._

Crimson eyes fixating on slate grey. She keeps her smile and feels the curl of their fingers around her hands. She can see it, the way their throat shifts, holding a question on why she chose them for the fixation of her friendship, but they offer no word. She likes their voice, but breathes in the silence, and feels content.


End file.
